this post was submitted on 24 Aug 2024
117 points (92.1% liked)
Technology
58164 readers
3512 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
How is that clean energy, in any sense of the word? Any system that gains some energy from a passing car must necessarily decrease the (kinetic) energy of the car by an equal or greater amount. And the vast majority of cars get their kinetic energy by burning fossil fuels. Sounds like a more expensive, less direct, and less efficient version of a gasoline generator.
It depends. Is this energy the same energy that is already being burned?
Looking at an extremely simple example: Solar powered calculators (the real ones). They harness light from the light bulbs in a room which would be otherwise dark. The only time they are harnessing that power, is when the light is on. They add no extra draw to the light, they are 100% passive. The only time you’d really have to take into consideration how green that power is (explicitly for the calculator) is if you are turning on that light explicitly to power the calculator.
If the tech being talked about is just harnessing the “junk energy” of the vehicles in their normal operation, this would be 100% green energy. If it is adding a load, it is 100% dirty when powered by an ICE. If it’s somewhere in the middle… I hope you get my point.
You’re also ignoring the fact that not all vehicles are ICE.
What kind of junk energy is there to harvest from a car (in meaningful amounts)? I guess breaking is the obvious answer, but that's already covered by regenerative breaking. Most car-based energy harvesting systems seem to employ speedbumps that clearly take useful (kinetic) energy away from the car (probably at a very poor efficiency).